Marlon James
Marlon James is a Jamaican born postmodern, historical fiction, and fantasy writer. He has published four novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) and Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019). James now resides in Minneapolis and teaches literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. James is also a faculty lecturer at St. Francis College's Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Early life James was born on November 24th, 1970, in the Surrey County of Kingston, Jamaica. The child of parents who both worked in Jamaican law enforcement. His mother, who gave him his first prose book (a collection of stories by O. Henry), became a detective, and his father, who James took a love of Shakespeare and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a lawyer. James graduated from the University of the West Indies in 1991, where he studied Language and Literature. He left Jamaica to escape homophobic violence and economic conditions that he felt would mean career stagnation. James himself explained, "Whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica". He received a master's degree in creative writing from Wilkes University. Career James has taught English and creative writing at Macalester College since 2007. He published his first novel – which was rejected 70 times before being accepted for publication – in 2005, titled John Crow's Devil, which told the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. His second novel The Book of Night Women, which came out 2009, is about a slave woman's revolt on a Jamaican plantation in the early 19th century. His next novel, 2014's A Brief History of Seven Killings, explores several decades of Jamaican history and political instability through the lens of an attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica in 1976 and its aftermath. It won the fiction category of the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, having been the first book by a Jamaican author ever to be shortlisted. He is also the second Caribbean writer to ever win the prize, following Trinidad and Tobago-born V. S. Naipaul who won in 1971. James latest work is the fantasy novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and is the first in his planned "Dark Star" series. Works *John Crow's Devil (2005) *The Book of Night Women (2009) *A Brief History of Seven Killings '' (2014) Dark Star Trilogy *''Black Leopard, Red Wolf'' (Book 1) (2019) Themes Themes in James’s work span from religion and supernatural to sexuality, violence, and colonialism. Often, his novels display the struggle to find an identity, whether it be as a slave or in postcolonial Jamaica. In John Crow’s Devil, his first novel, he explores postcolonial Jamaica through a religiously-charged, archetypal battle of good and evil. His characters in this novel represent, through their archetypal portrayals, many facets of humanity including hope. Despite the particular setting, the novel "conveys archetypal situations that reside in the collective unconsciousness. Additionally, this piece of Caribbean gothic reveals the power of guilt and hypocrisy both in a person and in a community, and generally reveals truths of human nature. The ghosts of colonialism are more subtle, but the instability and struggle for identity is clear to the reader. In The Book of Night Women, James challenges the traditional slave narrative by presenting a protagonist (Lilith) who approaches her enslavement with complex duality, despite the constant antagonism between slaves and masters on the plantation Jamaica the book is set. She hates all masters, but much of the novel deals with how she aspires to obtain a position of privilege within plantation society by submitting to the sexual subjugation of a white overseer, Robert Quinn. This is additionally challenged by Lilith and Robert’s “love”, leaving the reader to question their ideas of love, relationships, and their limits. Additionally, the novel explores the complexity of what it is to be a woman, with some characters having deep connections to Obeah and Myal spiritualism. The concept of genre is played with, with the female slaves being portrayed as intelligent and strong of willed, while the male slaves are often portrayed as weak, thoughtless, and even traitorous. The novel explores the explosive and antagonistic relationship between colonizers and colonized and graphic acts of rape, torture, murder and other acts of violence are woven into the narrative It is this complex intertweving of element that makes James’s book both disturbing and eloquent. His 2014 novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, portrays an "often angry account of postcolonial society struggling to balance identity and a burgeoning criminal element. The novel has 12 narrators, contributing to the "excess" that Sheri-Marie Harrison explores in her article "Excess in A Brief History of Seven Killings." She explains, "James's rejection of a purely nationalist tradition, like that of other authors in his cohort, concretizes his critique of the ways nationalism distracts us from the increased deregulation of global capital and its production of material inequality around the globe. This disruption of privileged tropes in the interest of turning attention onto the transnational forces that structure inequality helps to explain James's use of "a poetics of excess." His experimentation with form functions to rework now familiar paradigms and themes that have been central to the literary imagination of postcolonial realities for a little over half a century. His most recent book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), NPR journalist Ari Shapiro described it as "an epic fantasy quest — full of monsters, sex, and violence, set in a mythic version of ancient Africa. Influences and style James’s work carries a unique style, often referred to as disturbing, brutal, and violent, leading him to be compared in one review to Quentin Tarantino, who is known for his excessive use of violence in his films. James does not hold back in his graphic descriptions of sexual and violent acts, which contributes to the raw nature of his writing. “James does not set out to entertain, he does not want readers to be entertained by shocking events: he believes they should be rightly horrified…” His work is challenging and lyrical, and he often uses Jamaican Patois in dialogue, and often uses multiple dialects for different characters. His style strays from traditional and expected Caribbean Literature by "creating wild and risky new possibilities for thinking about the region's place in our contemporary reality. When speaking about Black Leopard, Red Wolf, James has said he studied the way George R. R. Martin crafts his violence with mythical creatures. James includes musicians as well as authors as influences in his work. When he won the Man Booker Prize, in his acceptance speech, James said "The reggae singers Bob Marley and Peter Tosh were the first to recognize that the voice coming out our mouths was a legitimate voice for fiction and for poetry." James cites an assortment of influences which include, but not are not limited to, comic books such as Black Panther, Batman and the X-Men, African folklore, Greek tragedy, William Faulkner, James Ellroy, Shakespeare, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his essay "From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself", James describes reading Salman Rushdie's "Shame" saying "its prose was so audacious, its reality so unhinged, that you didn't see at first how pointedly political and just plain furious it was. It made me realize that the present was something I could write my way out of." James’s writing has been compared to Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Gabriel García Márquez. Awards and recognition * 2009 – National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for The Book of Night Women * 2010 – Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Fiction) for The Book of Night Women * 2010 – Minnesota Book Award (Novel & Short Story) for The Book of Night Women * 2013 – Silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica * 2014 – National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for A Brief History of Seven Killings * 2015 – Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction for A Brief History of Seven Killings * 2015 – OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (Fiction category winner), for A Brief History of Seven Killings * 2015 – Man Booker Prize for Fiction for A Brief History of Seven Killings * 2015 – Green Carnation Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings